| 3. | | Foonly - Any of the machines built by Poole's company. The first
was the F-1 (a.k.a. Super Foonly), which was the
computational engine used to create the graphics in the movie
"TRON". The F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, but only
one was ever made. The effort drained Foonly of its financial
resources, and the company turned toward building smaller,
slower, and much less expensive machines. Unfortunately,
these ran not the popular TOPS-20 but a TENEX variant called
Foonex; this seriously limited their market. Also, the
machines shipped were actually wire-wrapped engineering
prototypes requiring individual attention from more than
usually competent site personnel, and thus had significant
reliability problems. Poole's legendary temper and
unwillingness to suffer fools gladly did not help matters. By
the time of the Jupiter project cancellation in 1983, Foonly's
proposal to build another F-1 was eclipsed by the Mars, and
the company never quite recovered. See the Mars entry for
the continuation and moral of this story. | |